Hacker News Reader

Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

The press is certainly painting him as a fairly classic example of a celebrity CEO whose real expertise is looting the companies he runs, rather than turning them around.

On the flip side of that... I quake with terror at the thought of ever being charged with a crime in Japan. Repeated interrogations without the right to have a lawyer present? Delaying charges in order to secure multiple detentions? Harsh conditions of bail?

All of these things seem to be engineered to produce guilty pleas or convictions without a lot of pesky pushback from the accused.

View on HN

> celebrity CEO whose real expertise is looting the companies he runs, rather than turning them around

Why can’t it be both?

We have evidence he turned the companies around [1]. And we have evidence he paid personally-affiliated companies money for dubious services [2], a track record that has been probed by multiple countries [3].

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/276268.Turnaround

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-22/lebanese-...

[3] https://www.france24.com/en/20190703-france-police-raid-rena...

Hallelujah. When I see stories like this, I'm always reminded of what a strong, natural human predilection there is to choose sides. But when I look at the reports, the simplest explanation seems to me that both sides are true:

1. Ghosn was a talented CEO who engineered big turnarounds at Renault and Nissan, who also was likely embezzling from the company.

2. The Japanese justice system is fundamentally tilted toward the prosecution, and is especially unfair to powerful foreign individuals.

Ghosn kind of reminds me of this quote: "Great men are almost always bad men."

Personally, I hope this to be a good show to Japanese people. The timing is good too. It is finally dawning on people in Japan that their government might not be entirely fair, and how the extreme rich like him can do shady dealings. Many of them have been too naive.

> painting him as a fairly classic example of a celebrity CEO whose real expertise is looting the companies he runs

I don't see that. Most press commends him for turning around Nissan and Renault.

He may have gotten greedy. His downfall was more due to social norms. Greed is perceived in a good light in the USA. Greed is a cardinal sin in Japan. (I'm generalizing)

Ghosn probably felt he should have taken the GM job when Obama offered it to him. His counterpart there was easily making more than he was despite all the financial engineering he had to do to get what he viewed as fair compensation

I think it’s a gross oversimplification to say that greed is perceived in a good light in the USA. Financial inequality and the ever-widening gap between CEO pay and worker pay is a contentious subject in the USA as elsewhere.

That being said, nobody does anything about it in the USA for various reasons, and I’ll accept that the USA is certainly one of the easier places in the world to get away with egregious greed.

I employed a fair bit of hyperbole in my previous comment, so take it with a grain of salt.

Japan and France, where Ghosn was CEO of 2 companies, have strict compensation caps for executives. In the USA there is no such thing. The cultural perception of making a lot of money is different in Japan and France vs USA.

> In the USA there is no such thing.

That's not strictly true. There is a tax code provision that prohibits companies from counting executive compensation of over $1MM as an operating expense, the intention being to discourage high compensation by essentially putting an additional tax on the excess compensation. It's not very effective, particularly since "performance-based" compensation was exempt until a couple years ago.

There are also harder limits for executive (and other people's) compensation in government contracting. Somewhat more effective than the above, but still not great.

What are the caps on France? The top CEOs are paid several tens of millions of euros. The limits are cultural to some extend, but I do not know of any legal ones (for private companies, the public ones do have legal caps)

It's that old Gordon Gekko trope that everyone takes as gospel here. I don't think Gordon was really a hero in that movie, but I beg to differ with other interpretations.

I don't understand this gap issue.

Japan, CEO gets paid $1 million a year. Engineer makes $60k

USA, CEO gets paid $100 million a year. Engineer makes $300k

I much prefer the higher paid CEO as he's paying me 5x what my Japanese counterpart gets paid.

On top of which in Japan I have to grovel up to my CEO and speak to them like royalty using super groveling language where as the CEO in the USA can call by their first name and treat them as just another person.

Your comment does a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid calling stealing, stealing and a crime, crime.

Americans don’t view greed positively, we are too busy trying to survive a rigged system without falling victim to some financially crippling life event.

At the personal level, I don't think many value greed as a virtue. The only people who do this explicitly to my knowledge are the descendants of Rand's Objectivism, of which our Fed chair of many years, Alan Greenspan, was definitely an adherent. His chairmanship had ushered in a new culture of vulture capital in the 80s and we're only now catching up on how dystopian it all is.

And its not the first Gaijin CEO In Japan, to get in trouble when he rocked to boat.

Though all countries look askance at "them furniners" eg The HP / Autonomy Trial.

TLDR for HP/Autonomy ?

>Greed is perceived in a good light in the USA.

Yeah! That's why Martin Shkrelli was so admired as a national hero in the U.S.

...right?

I can't think of a single place on this planet where greed is admired, unless you want to over-generalize and lump in general capitalism and entrepreneurship -- but I think that the effort to over-define greed into any and all wealth accumulation is missing the actual point behind the concept of greed itself.

Lots of downvotes, but this comment is essentially correct. I have never seen an American business mag lionize an executive for their "greed", for example. Innovation, vision, boldness, etc. etc. It may all be B.S., but it's not saying "this executive, he's so greedy, isn't that great?!"

Greed is not perceived as negatively in the U.S. as in, for example, Japan, but it is not, here or anywhere I am aware of, perceived "in a good light". When you want to suck up to an executive in the U.S., you don't commend them on how "greedy" they are, because (in the U.S. like anywhere else), that's an insult.

Naked greed is perceived badly, because it's frankly rather lower class.

But cut-throat monopolistic market domination, gaming, and consumer/employee abuse - that's just sound business ethics.

I think what you are missing is that "greed" is in the eye of the beholder. Of course a business magazine never worships the "greed" of a great businessperson, but they do worship a person's ability to make huge deals.

America definitely worships actions that many would consider to fall under the "greed" term, even if you don't. A great example is that Donald Trump's main qualification for being President was his wealth and business acumen. I think half the country would consider him a poster child for "greed" while the other half think his actions fit in on a resume.

In another article about Ghosn, it stated that in Japan there's a 99% conviction rate. That is scary.

If we read the same article, it suggested that Britain’s conviction rate was around 87%^H^H^H 80%.

(Hat tip to peteretep for the updated figure).

In anyway, it seems like a corrupt or wronged system. Being a Japanese born and living here, it seems very different in terms of what e-Gov tech practices can do over here than in similar regards in the US like Palantir, etc. Would be great if there was some resources to pave this kind of path, hell, we still use FAX and our IT ministry hasn't used a USB before.

80% in the UK vs 99% in Japan

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

Most criminal defence attorneys will admit that the most of the people they work with are guilty. It’s just how the police and justice system works when you get caught and what cases go forward. But 99% will always be insane and a giant red flashing light indicator of something is wrong.

At least 5-10% of people get off on technical details the police or prosecutors messed up or just good lawyering of guilty people. The rest the cases fall apart before trial because of witnesses or other evidence and turns of events. (I’m pulling these numbers out of my ass just to make a point).

The problems in Japan are with the due process and a serious lack of rights of the accused. Even if we completely ignore the conviction rates.

I’ve read a competing theory of Japan which says prosecutors are so over-worked they only go through with cases they know they’ll win. I wonder how one would decide?

In the UK, the CPS only prosecute cases with “a reasonable chance of conviction”, which I guess means they essentially choose the conviction rate they’re aiming for?

That sounds like the same bullshit line that the FISA courts give their 99%+ approval rating for domestic surveillance warrants.

We saw how that works in practice recently with that FBI report where the judges were basically yes men trusting everything the FBI told them without even basic scrutiny...

The Japanese system is more on the input end regarding due process and rights to counsel.

I think it’s impossible to decide which of two criminal justice systems is “better” knowing only the conviction rate of both. Asking people to do this or placing them in a position where they are likely to is asking them to commit to finding flawed reasoning to support their own biases — and probably has an enhancing effect on those biases.

In general there are hoops to go through before ending in front of a court: Police must gather enough evidence against someone. This means that the police and prosecution services think the someone is likely guilty based on evidence before someone is prosecuted.

It is therefore expected that conviction rates should be relatively high whether in the UK or Japan.

However, 99% really looks like rubber stamping a decision that was already made by the police... and that's a red flag.

That's a bit misleading. Prosecutors drop or misclassify things when they are unlikely to get a conviction. for example, murders can be classified as "accidents" or "suicides", and so forth.

I can see that, but knowing a bit about human nature and how Nissan was a bit salty over the Renault partnership and how they wanted him out I don't think he stood much chance. I dont know if he is guilty or not, but I don't blame him for getting out of there.

They have an imprisonment rate that is 1/15th that of the U.S.A., though, so that could be that they don't prosecute unless they're really certain they will win. U.S. prosecutors go after a lot more people.

https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america

99% conviction rate, and 23-day detention without charges. One can imagine the various ways to torture people with no lasting marks in 23 days, including the « cold room » (soaking someone in freezing water in the aircon, which made Michael P Fay accuse himself in Singapore in 1995). The thing that I didn’t know is, it is apparently renewable in Ghosn’s case without charges, then converted to half a year of detention.

Another fun tidbit of the Japanese system: they have to release you if they've held you for 23 days, so they give you back your possessions, walk you out the door and then swarm you with police five seconds later to arrest you again for a slightly different crime.

Of course, how many of us mere mortals will be keeping our jobs after no-showing and zero contact for 3 weeks?

Note that's basically what happened to Ghosn after he paid bail the first time. Let's remember this: he had to pay bail to be released to be reincarcerated. After which he paid bail again...

I quite like the rule about evidence without a warrant though. Its hard to make a solid rule on that one but it does feel off that the truth isn't admissible if malice was used to obtain it. Surely in its perfect abstract that malice is then a separate trial as long as the evidence is genuine.

Over time it is probably preferable not to permit the use of malice by the government against its citizens to ascertain the truth.

It does feel off. That’s why lawyers have a saying, “bad facts make bad law.”

That is, people tend to side with what feels right In a given situation rather than what is the best policy for a government to execute over millions of people over centuries.

Violating the bill of rights carries no criminal consequences. It's such an open ended set of rules I'm not sure its feasible for it to do so.

Something can be a good idea on a one-off basis and a terrible idea when generalising out. Having a fair legal system with strong protections for citizens against the authorities trumps any individual conviction.

You should take a look at the good faith exception: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/good_faith_exception_to_excl...

The Supreme Court only allows the exclusion of incriminating evidence only when it yields “appreciable deterrence”. In practice, this means that if police obtained a valid warrant (at the time), then the evidence is still admissible even if the warrant was later found to be illegal.

Case: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/564/229/

Not every country follows British common law jurisdiction like USA.

Japan, China and Many countries in Europe including Germany follows continental law. So probably just assuming that lawyers presence will change something substantially is not appropriate.

In those system a prosecutor only brings the case when they are convinced there is enough evidence to prosecute otherwise they themselves be on a hook, unlike common law jurisdiction. The only question here should be is the person given chance to defend himself and I believe in this case Japan did give enough chances so much so that the person moved all his wealth with his wife outside of Japan during trial. Send families to secure destinations with all the wealth.

Now himself absconded to a non extradition country. I hope such punishments are meted our to CEO of Enron, Lehman and many others in USA but didn’t happen.

Carlos knew very well the Japanese system when he agreed to work with Nissan. So all those stories of him being a victim is a pr run by his family and money.

The CEO of Enron, Jeff Skilling, was convicted and sentenced to 24 years in prison. He cut a deal later to get it reduced to 14 years, of which he served 12 before being released on parole.

Not sure what crime you think the CEO of Lehman Bros. committed (is not having enough pull with the Fed and US gov to get a bailout like the other large banks a crime?)

As for the "many others", Martha Stewart went to jail for five months. Bernie Madoff got a 150 year sentence and is still in jail. Timothy Rigas (Adelphia Communications) served over 10 years in prison. Etc, etc.

If Carlos would were in the US, his assets would have been frozen and not permitted to flee.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com